There are overwhelmingly good reasons to want utopia. “In 2025, 170,000 people die every day”. “There would be enough bliss to fill the rivers with tears of bliss”. See also: A sense that more is possible; a tentative upper bound on how much joy our future could contain; a claim about GDP growth rates that can be modus-tollensed into a tentative upper bound of just how much value the future could contain.

But perhaps one may feel these pictures are too galaxy-brained to be convincing. Is utopia not the stuff of science fiction? Why believe death can be cured? Why believe joy greater than the upper bound accessible to modern biological humans is possible? Why believe 3% growth rates can continue for even a decade, let alone eight thousand years?

To them I would suggest considering tiny improvements to their life. Thousands upon thousands of tiny improvements, so simple and obvious that one could imagine that, given biological immortality and several centuries, one could personally see themself achieving each and every item on this list. To pull up one’s sleeves and execute on a thousand mundane reasons to want utopia themselves, to confirm that more is indeed possible, that the 21st century is not that very close to the “upper bound” of how good things can get.

This post is an inversion of Gwern’s Ordinary Life Improvements since the 1990s post. It is an intuition pump for what a “boring”, 3%-year-on-year-value-growth future might look like, a slow, unending, simple path toward utopia.

The bugginess of the 21st century

Software. Why is it so buggy? Why must we need new software every 6 months? Why do even large, generally competent companies like Google still generate enough annoying bugs and errors-of-convenience that I notice about a dozen recurring ones in my own life? Why must Google again deprecate old, quality software?

Quoth Near:

i just want things to work. almost every app i use and service i sign up for is completely broken and you can tell no one cares about it. the only things i expect to work in my life are like nginx, redis, psql, and gnu coreutils. certainly no phone apps, no govt org, nothing else

Fun allowed?

Custom license plates are illegal in most of Europe! Why? It’s silly. Custom license plates, for those who care to pay the price, are a form of fun I admire about America. Just earlier today I found this car interesting enough to capture:

Toyota vehicle in San Francisco neighborhood, custom license plate reads “NOKINGS”.

I think the world would be poorer if America didn’t allow the wonder of this vehicle to purchase a custom license plate that says “NOKINGS”. This is just one out of a ~dozen examples I found by walking around San Francisco this afternoon.